Pro-Israel students, under the guidance of The David Project, recently joined the “Sh*t [people] say” internet craze on YouTube with their own video, “Sh*t People Say About Israel”. Filmed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the film clearly takes aim at supporters of the Palestinian cause and patronizes them as ignorant and misinformed. But the video fails on so many levels. Let’s see what kind of “Sh*t” these student hasbarists have to say.
1. Israel doesn’t even want peace.
If it did, it probably wouldn’t be incarcerating children or building concrete barriers through Palestinian villages or preventing Arabs from marrying Israelis or arming fanatical settlers colonizing the West Bank or demolishing homes or tearing through olive tree groves or shooting high velocity tear gas canisters at the faces of unarmed demonstrators.
2. I heard everyone there is in the army.
In Israel, military service is compulsory for all citizens above the age of 18. Recruits serve between two and three years and are given the opportunity to extend their service. Clearly, not everyone in Israel is in the military at any given moment, but the mandatory service means that most adult citizens have, at one point or another, served as an active military unit involved in the maintenance of a condemned and illegal occupation of Palestine.
Mind you, there does exist a refusenik subculture in Israel, but unless these individuals refuse to join the military for religious reasons, they are often stigmatized and prosecuted under Israeli law. Maya Wind, for example, spent forty days in a military prison for refusing to join the Israeli military on the basis that she could not agree with the military’s illegal activity towards the Palestinian people.
And so what if this isn’t Iran
The Times of Israel posted three videos of the current Harlem Shake dance craze going viral on YouTube. The first is of the Israeli army’s Artillery Corps. Just under that is a video from Ben Gurion University students performing the same dance routine.
But the third video is has nothing to do with Israel and is, instead, captioned, “Despite the title, this is not the Iranian army”. Although the video itself is titled “Harlem shake Iran Army” it appears to be Norwegian in origin. At about the 20th second mark, a soldier goofily falls out of a window while waving the flag of Norway.
This is nothing more than a petty dig at Iran, and considering how The Times of Israel claims itself to be ”fair, fresh and fast”, I can’t help but to wonder what exactly was the point of the article. To humanize the Israeli military, whose soldiers post disturbing images of aiming guns at children’s heads online? Or to dehumanize Iran for the sake of pushing anti-Iran sentiment and instigate further tension? [Read more...]